Link to Post:
http://altoonsultan.blogspot.com/2013/05/atmosphere-and-touch-paintings-of-john.html
Altoon Sultan blogs about the exhibition John Zurier: A spring a thousand years ago at Peter Blum Gallery, New York, on view through June 22 2013.
Sultan writes: "Within these minimally painted, sensitively brushed paintings there is a sense of boundless space, of light shimmering through thin veils of color... The paintings are paradoxically both rich and hardly there. I sense great care in the making of the work, and yet there's a feeling of freedom in its brushwork, freedom that comes from practice and from close attention... One of the things I admired about this show was the variety of approaches to making a painting; Zurier explores paint and surface, with each painting having a character of its own."
Link to Post:
http://art.newcity.com/2013/04/16/review-mcarthur-binionkavi-gupta-gallery/
Alan Pocaro reviews the exhibition McArthur Binion: Ghost: Rhythms at Kavi Gupta, Chicago, on view through June 22, 2013.
Pocaro writes: "Binion’s larger, more rural works... stand out. These misty-toned 'Circuit Landscapes Nos. V and VI' are freer in their deference to the Modernist grid, retaining the more ridged works’ austere coloration but with enhanced emotional purchase. Like ethereal heirloom quilts on antiseptic walls, they hang unpretentiously without stretchers... By maintaining an ongoing dialogue with his roots in the agrarian south, Binion’s paintings are largely symbolic, achieving a spiritual resonance that defies the typically reductive materialism associated with East Coast minimalism. "
Submitted by Brett Baker on March 5, 2013
Installation view, Alan Uglow at David Zwirner, New York, 2013 (image courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery)
An exhibition of works by Alan Uglow is on view at David Zwirner, New York, on view from February 19 - March 23, 2013.
Link to Post:
http://brenthallard.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/on-the-wall-suzie-idiens/
Brent Hallard interviews painter Suzie Idiens about her work.
Idiens comments: "Product manufacturing processes influence how the pieces are made, but not why they are made – it’s more a means of getting closer to singular form and colour. Initially softening the edges was instinctual, a way of giving the pieces a more sculpted, solid form. Once the high gloss finish was applied it then became a practical element of dealing with the visual continuity of the reflective surface by having a curved edge. As a result it does make them look rather plastic and manufactured, but they retain a certain (visual) weight about them. The deep relief gives the forms a tangible physicality, and the smooth reflective paint finish gives a luminous material quality to the colour, which in turn changes with the naturally transient effect of light and shadow. The paint finish is rather deceptive – though physically very thin it appears to have more depth, so that makes it intangible, gives it an otherness… rather like you try to look ‘into’ the object, but all you are really catching is what is being reflected in the piece."
Link to Post:
http://youhavebeenheresometime.blogspot.com/2012/11/this-is-how-we-walk-on-moon-every-step.html
David John posts an excerpt from an interview with Arne Glimcher where Glimcher recalls his final conversation with painter Agnes Martin.
Glimcher remarks: "I was there at the end of her life and she said ‘go down to the studio, there are three paintings. Hanging on the wall is the one I want to keep, I want you to destroy the other two.’ So I went down to the studio. The two paintings she wanted me to destroy were magnificent – absolutely perfect. The one on the wall was a very stormy painting, unlike anything that she had made since the 60s. I certainly didn’t want to destroy those two spectacular paintings but I did. I sliced them to ribbons and put them in the trash. When I came back. She said, 'did you do it?' I said, 'I did it.' And that was that. Our last conversation."
Link to Post:
http://www.art21.org/videos/short-robert-mangold-town-country
In a new video, Robert Mangold is interviewed at his upstate New York studio.
Mangold discusses the influence of urban and rural landscape on his geometric paintings: "When I moved to New York City, I was very interested in this idea of pieces of architecture that were both solid and that were atmospheric, and the idea that a similar form one way could be a gap between a building, and in another way could be a building. So I made these walls and areas, and quite literally one was the color of red brick and the other was the color of yellow brick." He continues "Looking out across the hills, I would see the same idea of atmosphere and form, except they were mountains and sky.. what came out of that was the idea that if I didn't use an organic mountain curve, and instead used a compass curve for the bottom edge of these forms, it would become something totally different and interesting. So, I went back and I started doing parts of circles and curved areas."
Link to Post:
http://glasstire.com/2012/06/21/interview-with-catherine-lee/
Katie Geha interviews painter and sculptor Catherine Lee about her work.
Lee remarks: "I have a really strong belief in the power of abstraction. My work refers to things in the world tangentially, but it’s not at all representational. I have a very strong allegiance to abstraction and I think that comes from my early upbringing in the Panhandle and El Paso, rather than from an art movement. Where I grew up the landscape was just nothing, it was flat, and there was nothing to stop the wind from blowing through an empty landscape. I’m working from that all the time, a really reduced perspective, a sense of vastness, space. Which made being in New York so hard—it’s extremely vertical and maximal. And what I know in my heart is very horizontal and reductive."
Link to Post:
http://www.theartblog.org/2012/06/interview-with-douglas-witmer-on-art-and-modesty/
Libby Rosof interviews painter Douglas Witmer about his work and process.
Witmer comments: that: "My approach is completely additive. ...I tried to find a way of painting where I couldn’t touch it–so I was dropping color with a turkey baster, kind of like color fields. ...Could I just know what my choices are going to be? So I began to identify painting actions, to choose what I would do. If I insert myself too much, that does damage to the work. Along the way, at a certain point, I make decisions about a color. I'll be thinking about a memory of a color, or I’ll choose a color. These are super-personal choices. It’s for me and for others if they choose to receive it. I just live in hope that people take the moment to receive it."
Link to Post:
http://www.artcritical.com/2012/05/12/brice-marden/
Jonathan Goodman reviews Brice Marden: New Paintings at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, on view through June 23, 2012.
Of Marden's painting Ru Ware Project, 2007-2012, Goodman writes that the "monochromatic panels effectively join Marden's interest in historical Chinese culture with his minimalist work done two generations earlier. The painting exquisitely makes use of colors that come from a thousand years ago, in ways that dazzle through subtlety... at 526 West 22nd Street, there is a group of new works done on marble, which inevitably refer to the six-year period, 1981 through 1987, during which he painted on marble and bridged the minimalist paintings with the calligraphic ones. In the new group of paintings, it is possible to see how inventive the artist is; First Square (2011) looks like a transformation from the ancient to the very new."
Link to Post:
http://abstractcritical.com/2012/02/the-indiscipline-of-painting-an-email-interview-with-daniel-sturgis/
Sam Cornish interviews painter Daniel Sturgis, curator of the exhibition The Indiscipline of Painting: International Abstraction from 1960 to Now, on view at Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre through March 10 2012 (formerly at Tate St. Ives).
Sturgis comments that the show is "a personal selection – one built on my concerns – but also with generosity at its core. The illusion of things in space, as you put it – is something that I am less interested in finding in recent work. Or rather I am more interested in other work – work that confronts the legacy of minimalist and modernist painting and its fission with the contemporary world that surrounds us. For me that is a crucial issue – or it is at the moment."
